CHAPTER THREE

Liberated or not, I felt silly picking Jordon up in my car, especially since we were going to take a walk. The logic escaped me. He was standing outside, waiting for me, which made me feel better, since if I’d seen Jonny, I might have given in to my impulses and invited him along. I considered getting out and opening the door for him; instead I opened it from the inside and giggled as he entered.

“I’m glad to see you’re in such a good mood,” he said.

“I’m not,” I said. “Somethingjust struck me funny.”

“What?”

“Nothing I could explain,” I said. I could have explained it to Jonny. “How’re you?”

“Better than yesterday,” he replied. “Actually pretty good. It’s a nice day.”

“It was a nice day yesterday.”

“For you maybe. Not for me.”

“Why?” I asked, and started driving aimlessly. I was looking for a nice patch of land to walk on. It wouldn’t be too hard to find, I knew. The further away from town you drove, the more estates there were, full of walkable fields. The problem was to find one without “No Trespassing” signs screaming at you. I didn’t mind if they were there, just as long as they didn’t scream.

“No particular reason,” Jordon said. He was looking out the side window, which disconcerted me slightly.

“Something must have happened,” I said. “When I met Jonny, he was very upset.”

“Jonny upsets too easily. He got into the middle of something that didn’t concern him. So he left. Jonny’s very good at that.”

“In other words you got into a fight with someone and Jonny got involved and then he left. Right?”

“Right,” he said. “Satisfied?”

“No,” I said, because there was something about Jordon that made me want to challenge him. “Who was the fight with?”

“My father,” Jordon said. “My mother too, for that matter. A good old-fashioned family brawl.”

“About you?”

“Of course about me. All family fights are about me.”

“Not in my family.”

“All right. All family fights in my family are about me. Now are you satisfied?”

“No,” I said again, and wished I could spot a piece of land. “Look for some place to park, would you? I’m in the mood to stretch my legs. Why aren’t fights in your family about Jonny?”

“Because Jonny’s perfect.”

“Come on,” I said. “Jonny’s nice, but he’s not God.”

“Heretic,” he said. “In my family there is but one god and his name is Jonathan.”

“You sound bitter.”

“Oh, I’m not bitter. I’m beyond bitter.”

“There must be a reason though. Why they’re so fond of Jonny.”

“I don’t understand my parents,” Jordon said. “I have never made any effort to understand my parents. We are different species, my parents and me. We speak separate languages. It is only the wildest coincidence that we are on the same planet at the same time.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, and found a place to walk. I pulled the car over to the side of the road, and wondered what the hell I was doing.

“My parents love Jonny because he’s well mannered and gets good grades. Everyone loves Jonny. Even I love Jonny. He’s a very lovable kid.”

“And you aren’t?”

“It depends who you ask.”

“I’m asking you. Let’s get out.”

“I can’t,” he grumbled. “Your door won’t open.”

“Summertime,” I said. In the winter, my car stalls. In the summer, the doors stick. I got out, ran around the front of the car, and opened the door for Jordon. This time he laughed with me.

“No wonder women feel oppressed,” he said. “Not even able to open your own doors.”

“It’s enough to make you burn your bras.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there. I’ll burn yours though, if you want.”

“We were talking about your lovableness.”

“What a topic,” he said. “Well, shall we start walking?”

“Sure,” I said, and scrambled over the fence that was there to keep people from scrambling over it. Jordon swung over it flashily. I clapped.

“Gymnastics,” he said. “My best subject in school.”

“How many letters did you get?” I asked. I hate school athletes.

“None,” he said. “I don’t mean I was any good in gym. I was terrible. No team spirit. No school spirit. I don’t know how they expected me to have school spirit, since I kept changing schools. But I was really good at gymnastics. You know, ropes and rings. Parallel bars. That was the only thing I could do, but I could do them really well.”

“Why did you keep changing schools?”

We started walking. It was a nice field, lots of trees but not too many bushes. “Because I kept getting kicked out of the other schools,” he said.

“Why?”

“Don’t you know any other words?”

“Lots,” I said. “But why’s the only one that keeps popping up.”

“I kept getting kicked out because I was a troublemaker. Are you going to ask why?”

“Eventually,” I said. “Right now I want to know what kind of trouble.”

“Nothing original,” he said. “Petty theft, destruction of property …”

“What kind of property?”

“What’re you doing, making a police report?”

“No. Just curious.”

“School books,” he said. “I used to tear school books up, and write obscenities in them. Want to hear which words?”

“None I don’t know, I’m sure,” I said. “What else?”

“You want more?”

“Sure,” I said. “Right now all you’ve done is stuff I gave up doing third grade.” Actually, it was more like stuff I wanted to do third grade but never had the nerve for. I saw no reason for Jordon to know that though.

“Insulting teachers,” he said. “Insulting the principal. Assaulting the principal.”

“Now I’m impressed,” I said. “Why’d you do that?”

“We’re back to the whys.”

“Only temporarily.”

“I didn’t really assault him,” Jordon said. “And he wasn’t really a principal. He used to be a colonel, but the army kicked him out, and he’d gotten this job in charge of a military school. Not a top one, I assure you. My parents sent me there out of desperation when I was a junior, which is much too late to start a military school, if there is a good time, which I doubt. Anyway, I got drunk one night, which is fairly common in third-rate military schools, and they brought me into his office the next day, and he explained the entire court-martial procedure to me, and how much better I’d be if I pleaded guilty, and I slugged him. He had a very soft belly.”

“I still don’t understand why you slugged him.”

“You had to be there,” Jordon said. “Do you want to add getting drunk to my list of sins?”

“Okay,” I said, and was starting to get impressed. Jordon sounded like some of the worst of my mother’s patients. “Anything else?”

“You are insatiable.”

“No,” I said, because I was pretty satisfied right then.

“There were a couple of incidents with drugs. I’m on probation now.”

“Grass?” I asked, and hoped it was grass.

“This last time, yeah,” he said. “One summer when I was in high school I got caught at a party and there was some coke there, so they arrested all of us. My father got them to drop charges for me. Very nice of him.”

“So the grass is your first conviction.”

“Yeah. They go easy on first convictions these days, especially when you plead guilty and look rich. Probation’s a drag though. It means I have to spend the summer here, and I can’t leave without getting permission, and I have to report in every so often. Intellectually I know it’s better than jail, but emotionally I’m not so sure.”

“That’s quite a record you have there,” I said.

“I left some stuff out,” he said. “A few fights with students. I got kicked out of a Quaker school for fighting all the time with the kids.”

I giggled, mostly from nerves.

“I think it’s funny too,” he said. “They were so mad they stuttered over their ‘thees.’ That was my freshman year. The military school was junior year, and after that I spent senior year at this boys’ school that was really a reformatory for rich delinquents.”

“What about a school for emotionally disturbed adolescents?”

“Oh I did one of those sophomore year. That was my breakdown year, the year my parents decided all my problems came on with puberty. I’d been kicked out of four schools before that, but they didn’t care. So they sent me to a really high-class place, cost them a fortune, where I had lots of therapy and got to associate with a high class of madman. I really enjoyed myself that year.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“For a couple of reasons. First of all, it cost too much. My parents could afford it, but there was a limit to the amount of money they were willing to spend on me. And secondly, I wasn’t getting anything out of it. The therapist said so.”

“Really?” I’d been taught therapy was a wonderful thing, and found it hard to believe it wouldn’t cure someone with such ordinary problems as Jordon.

“My therapist didn’t like me,” Jordon said. “I didn’t blame him at the time. He just didn’t like me. We didn’t have sessions, we had contests. Finally, around March, he agreed he was the wrong therapist for me, something I could have told him in October, but they never listened to us at that school, because we were all crazy. So I got a new one, who seemed very nice. I wouldn’t want to say my therapy was getting any place with him, but it made me feel better. Except that the school year ended, and my first therapist did the report on me, since I’d been his patient for so much longer, and he said how I was incapable of progressing in their environment, and my parents took his word for it.”

“And you didn’t?”

“Not at the time. I wanted to stay there. For one thing, I was surrounded by other kids who tore up books and stole things. My kind of people. I’d never had that before, and I liked it. That Quaker school was a hot bed of normalcy. Healthiest rich kids you’d ever met.”

“What about now? Do you think you should have stayed at the school?”

“The thing is, given my parents, there was no way I could have stayed more than a year. My parents had no patience with me. If it didn’t work out, I was going to leave, and if it did, I would leave anyway since I’d be cured. My parents can’t handle transition. It’s beyond them.”

“But you’re in college now?”

“Yeah,” Jordon said, and sat down on a rock. I sat down next to him. “We found a sucker school in the city. It likes troubled students with potential.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “I didn’t know you had potential.”

“Nobody did,” he said. “Scared the hell out of everybody. My grades had always been, shall we say, erratic. But I got 700s in my Boards.”

“How?”

“I didn’t cheat, if that’s what you mean. They really guard you during these things; there was no way I could. I just guessed right on everything. So I was taken on conditionally, and except for getting busted, I’ve been behaving myself as far as anybody knows.”

“I’m absolutely amazed,” I said.

“About what?”

“Lots of things,” I said. “But mostly about how different you and Jonny are. I bet he never slugged a principal.”

“Jonny never slugged anybody,” Jordon said. “Not even me.”

“Why are you so different?”

“How should I know?” he said.

“You must have a theory.”

“You probably have one yourself.”

“Probably,” I said. “But I want to hear yours first.”

“He was born lucky,” Jordon said. “Satisfied?”

“Not at all.”

“He was born unlucky then, and that’s what did it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean anything. What’s more, I’m finding this conversation tiresome. Shall we change the subject?”

“You didn’t mind when we were talking about you. Now I want to talk about Jonny.”

“I bet you’re a killer at home.”

“I have my moments,” I said. “Why was Jonny born unlucky?”

“I didn’t mean anything by that,” he said. “Except that he was born with some kind of kidney condition and my parents really worried he wouldn’t live. And they cured him. He’s fine now. He’s been fine since he was ten months old, but my parents still haven’t gotten over it. They were patient for the only time in their lives, ten months patient, and Jonny got cured. So he’s special.”

“And you’re not?”

“Oh, I’m special all right,” Jordon said. “There aren’t too many of me in this world.” He looked away from me, toward the house. It was too far away to see as anything more than a small white blob. My parents had sold most of their land and given the money to various causes. It had created quite a stir when they did, since the neighbors didn’t want other houses built there, so they’d bought the land from Dad. I was allowed to trespass on that land all my childhood, but it always felt odd knowing it had once been ours.

It was an awkward silence, and I was trying to think of something to end it when Jordon said. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

“Going out with Jonny,” I said, assuming he knew.

“Oh,” Jordon said. “You’re going to have to make a choice, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “But it may not come to that.”

“I want it to,” he said. “And I want you to choose me.”

“Why should I?” I asked.

“I’m not running for office,” he said. “I don’t have to give a list of my credentials.”

“You already have,” I said. “You fall just slightly short of ax murder.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I didn’t cheat on my College Boards.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “Neither did I. Most people don’t.”

“Who will it be, me or Jonny?” he said. “Choose.”

“And what if I don’t want to?”

“It’s not a question of want. If you go out with Jonny tomorrow night, you’ll never see me again.”

“And if I go out with you, I’ll never see Jonny, because then I’ll never see you. That gives me a lot of area to move around in.”

“You’ll see Jonny,” he said. “Jonny and I are good friends. You’ll just never see Jonny without me. Unless, of course, you choose him.”

“I resent this,” I said. “You’re trying to blackmail me.”

“I am trying to survive,” he said. “Now that may be a little difficult for you to grasp, but it’s the truth. Jonny doesn’t mean to, but he takes things from me. He always has, and he probably always will, but I’ve reached a point where I’ll fight back, even if I have to fight dirty. I don’t want to lose you. You listen well. You ask questions like you really care. You are pretty and intelligent and socially acceptable. You could make what’s going to be a hellish summer for me a little more bearable. I’m not going to give that up easily, especially not to Jonny. There it is. Now choose, dammit.”

“No,” I said. “I’m leaving. Want a lift back?”

“I’ll walk,” he said. “Stretch my legs.”

“All right,” I said, and walked back to my car. I drove home angry, and pulled short of hitting a rabbit. I wasn’t supposed to, I knew. Better to kill an animal than kill yourself. But it would have felt like murder.

“How was your afternoon?” Marion called, as I slammed the door.

“Don’t ask,” I said, and walked up to my room, pretending not to be too mad. I called Sandy, only her line was busy. I put on a good loud record at top volume, and tried to think. When I’d calmed down enough, I made my decision, and called the Stapleton house. Jordon answered the phone.

“Let me speak to Jonny,” I said, in no mood for manners.

Jordon handed the phone over to Jonny. “Hello?” he said.

“Jonny, this is Paula. I’m afraid I can’t go out with you tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Jonny said. “Why not?”

“Something came up.”

“Oh,” Jonny said. “Well, okay. Some other time then.”

“Maybe,” I said, and hung up, feeling sick to my stomach. Two minutes later the phone rang.

“Yes?” I said.

“Jordon,” he said. “What do you want to do tomorrow night?”

“Nothing with you,” I said, and slammed the phone down.